I’m skeptical that we should give much weight to message testing with the “educated general public” or the reaction of people on Twitter, at least when writing for an audience including lots of potential direct work contributors.
Yes, if the purpose of the book is to persuade talented readers to start working on AIS. Yet it could be more valuable to reap the indirect positive effects of bringing longtermism into the Overton window. As a crude example, it’s now more likely that Terrence Tao will feel fine about working on alignment; an AI-focused MacAskill book might have failed to accomplish that due to lower popularity.
EDIT: You’ve somewhat addressed this in response to another comment. I’ll add that there was a nontrivial chance of WWOTF becoming a NYT #1 bestseller for 30 weeks and giving longtermism a Silent Spring moment. More targeted “let’s start working on AI” outreach is good, but I’m not so sure that it’s higher EV.
I agree that to the extent WWOTF robustly improves the general public attitude toward longtermism this is an upside. There are of course potential downsides to popularizing the movement too quickly and growing too fast as well (edited to add: for more on potential downsides, see this comment). As I mention in the piece, I’m significantly more confident in the claim that The Precipice is better for potential longtermist direct workers than about WWOTF vs. The Precipice for the general public.
This also goes for claims about WWOTF’s effects in general, compared to no new book being released; I didn’t intend to make strong claims about that in this post.
Yes, if the purpose of the book is to persuade talented readers to start working on AIS. Yet it could be more valuable to reap the indirect positive effects of bringing longtermism into the Overton window. As a crude example, it’s now more likely that Terrence Tao will feel fine about working on alignment; an AI-focused MacAskill book might have failed to accomplish that due to lower popularity.
EDIT: You’ve somewhat addressed this in response to another comment. I’ll add that there was a nontrivial chance of WWOTF becoming a NYT #1 bestseller for 30 weeks and giving longtermism a Silent Spring moment. More targeted “let’s start working on AI” outreach is good, but I’m not so sure that it’s higher EV.
I agree that to the extent WWOTF robustly improves the general public attitude toward longtermism this is an upside. There are of course potential downsides to popularizing the movement too quickly and growing too fast as well (edited to add: for more on potential downsides, see this comment). As I mention in the piece, I’m significantly more confident in the claim that The Precipice is better for potential longtermist direct workers than about WWOTF vs. The Precipice for the general public.
This also goes for claims about WWOTF’s effects in general, compared to no new book being released; I didn’t intend to make strong claims about that in this post.